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Plasmonic refractive index sensitivity of tetrapod gold nanostars: tuning the branch length and protein layer

  • Regular Article – Clusters and Nanostructures
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Abstract

The refractive index sensitivity of the tetrapod nanostars was studied. The extinction spectra and environmental refractive index sensitivity of the tetrapod gold nanostars with different branch lengths were calculated, and it was found that the environmental refractive index sensitivity of the tetrapod gold nanostars with longer branches was higher. The environmental refractive index sensitivity of the tetrapod gold nanostar coated with a protein layer is calculated. The greater the dielectric constant of the protein layer, the smaller the influence of the thickness of the protein layer on the refractive index sensitivity of the tetrapod gold nanostar, but at the same time the tetrapod nanostars can achieve higher environmental refractive index sensitivity. These sensing properties of the tetrapod gold nanostars provide potential for nano-optical biosensing research and provide theoretical guidance for the design of LSPR-based biosensors and SERS applications.

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Data Availability Statement

This manuscript has no associated data or the data will not be deposited. [Authors’ comment: This is a theoretical paper. This work is an analytical computational and theoretical study of the corresponding model and does not use any relevant data.].

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (2021JM-024).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, People’s Republic of China

    Lin-yu Lu, Jian Zhu, Guo-jun Weng, Jian-Jun Li & Jun-Wu Zhao

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  1. Lin-yu Lu
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  2. Jian Zhu
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  3. Guo-jun Weng
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  4. Jian-Jun Li
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Contributions

LL: methodology; investigation; data curation; writing—original draft. JZ: formal analysis; writing—review and editing. G-JW: conceptualization; resources; writing—review and editing; supervision; funding acquisition. J-JL: resources; project administration; supervision. J-WZ: conceptualization; resources; writing—review and editing, supervision.

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Correspondence to Jian Zhu or Jun-Wu Zhao.

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Lu, Ly., Zhu, J., Weng, Gj. et al. Plasmonic refractive index sensitivity of tetrapod gold nanostars: tuning the branch length and protein layer. Eur. Phys. J. D 76, 54 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/s10053-022-00375-w

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